CAMDEN, N.J. (CBS) – Officials are moving to take over hundreds of abandoned properties across the city, hoping to turn them into occupied and taxable homes. The effort started in the city’s Cramer Hill section.

Standing in front of one of the first 59 properties to be taken over through the Abandoned Properties Act, Camden Mayor Dana Redd laid out the plan which in a matter of months will make at least 20 of them available on the open market.

“We have to make abandoned properties and vacant properties a priority if we are ever to move Camden forward. I don’t like them. You don’t like them. We don’t like them because they attract rodents and other unwanted elements in our neighborhoods,”she says such as criminals and drug dealers.

Other neighborhoods throughout Camden will put together lists of blighted properties to be submitted to the city for verification and approval to be added to the takeover list available to private citizens and developers alike.

Reported by David Madden, KYW Newsradio

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One Comment

About time. However, the people that are going to move in should be required to attend parenting and life skills training, get GEDs, and not be allowed to collect Welfare. They have to stop getting handouts….it only promotes laziness.

Good idea BUT this has been done in the city of Chester repeatedly. They rebuild rundown houses and even level abandoned old houses and build new ones. The only problem is that they have to do this every 10-15 years because they get trashed!

Urban areas that are in terrible condition and wracked with poverty and crime have had their renaissance in other places and it can happen here too. The lower east side in NYC? The South End near Pine Street Inn in Boston? Neighborhoods in Chicago? Keep seeing the vision people. Those places turned into vibrant, diverse communities with young people, artists, great pubs, dog parks, etc.

It can happen in Camden, too. And by the way, the Pine Street Inn (the largest homeless community in New England) is still right there in that Boston neighborhood. The revitalization happened all around it. Those things don’t have to be removed to have safety and a flourishing community. In fact (gasp), they are NOT the cause of the problem! Crime, though, will definitely keep a place down!

For its size, New Jersey has the least public college resources (and the most expensive). This is one reason colleges elsewhere recruit NJ students since they don’t have to even compete with much cheaper tuition like they have in, say, Florida or North Carolina.

But, funding issues aside, a great boon for the state and Camden would be to greatly expand the Rutgers Camden campus and have a large residential student population.

Actually, no. The lowest common denominator people have a certain comfort zone. It’s like light for vampires: just let the light shine there and they will scatter. It has worked elsewhere. But there still has to be an anchor of activity for this growth. Aquariums and concert venues don’t work to, alone, create that anchor because people drive in, visit and leave. The university is the best place to start alongside quality of life stuff. I once lived in a very rough neighborhood with crack vials all over the ground — and people laughed at the early efforts to pick up litter and plant flowers. Of course that’s not all that turned it around but it totally changed the tone. In the end, the light won out and the vampires ran. That neighborhood and others are a whole different story now.

Now I ask you, who in the hell in their right mind would want to live in Camden? Maybe a Mexican or Black who has no job, no way to keep up the home, has prior criminal record or is in the country illegally & lastly, if the state & or fEDERAL GOV. GIVES HIM THE HOUSE & food stamps, rent vouchers a la section 8, help with the elec & gas, sure, they’ll live there on the taxpayers money.